Follow Us!

Humble Bundle with Android 7 Review

Greed Corp Review:

Greed Corp is a turn-based RTS with a cartoony style and one very interesting mechanic. As you harvest resources, you damage the playing field, and eventually the damage will cause sections to plummet into an abyss. Now you have to manage troops, resources, and the map in order to win.

The story is fairly straightforward; the world this is taking place on has been abused to the point that little land mass remains. Now you are fighting for what land remains against others in equally dire circumstances.

The gameplay is also somewhat straightforward, but offers quite a bit amount of depth, due to the land-destruction mechanic. Two units are able to cause land destruction: harvesters and cannons. The harvesters will pull out resources and destroy a level to the regions around it each turn. Eventually it will destroy the tile it stands on, but you can also have it self-destruct. Doing so destroys the tile it is on, removes a level from nearby tiles, and all critically damaged tiles connected to it will topple. This chain reaction can be very devastating. The cannon can also cause these chain reactions, but at range. Still, it is a somewhat viable strategy to rush into an opponent's lands, build a harvester, and destruct it when the time is right. The necessity to think multiple moves ahead reminds me a great deal of chess.

The graphics are, as I said, cartoony, but stand up to scrutiny pretty well, at least on the PC. There you get nice looking post-processing effects and actual cracking to the critical tiles and destroyed tiles. On the phone though, the effects are toned down quite a bit. Instead of cracking the tiles, a cracked texture is applied. Also the post-processing effects are removed, which makes it noticeably darker. Still, all of the graphical elements of the PC version are present in the Android version.

PC on the left. Android on the right.

The soundtrack has a strong 50's era sound to it, almost certainly trying to prime you for the idea of large-scale production and mass-complexes for manufacture.

Personally, I could see myself spending quite a bit of time in Greed Corp, until the AI has surpassed my skill and I drop it for a while. That should not be taken as a negative, but that I expect the game to become very challenging in later levels. You cannot rely on the strategies you use in other RTSs because of the land-destruction mechanic, so you will have to adapt to advance, which adds to the challenge and fun. Can definitely recommend this game to anyone looking for an innovative turn-based RTS, so go ahead and get the bundle for this alone, but a warning for the Android version. While it is playable on a smartphone screen, the UI elements can be quite small. A tablet screen would be much better to play on.